On June 19, 2019, Professor Feng Xiang of Tsinghua University was invited to visit our law school to hold an academic lecture on the topic “The Future Has Come – Challenge and Response of the Hard Rules of the Intelligent Society”. The lecture was presided over by Vice President Wang Lusheng.Teachers and students of law school attended the lecture.

Starting from the general social phenomenon, Professor Feng Xiang pointed out the challenges that may be brought about by the rigid regularization of the legal system in the foreground of the intelligent society--1. the gradual demise of personal privacy; 2. leading the law toward a hard-rule system; 3. profoundly changing the habits of life and the meaning of life. Different from the traditional soft governance relying on persuasion and understanding, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, the governance rules could be implemented without the need of human understanding, relying on technical means to implement hard governance, and refused to accept hard rule governance. It meant being excluded from the smart society. The trend of complicating this rule was in line with the development of smart technology itself. It was foreseeable that in the near future, legislation, justice, and law enforcement will become more intelligent and more complex.

Professor Feng Xiang believed that because the hard rule governance of smart society needed to be carried out with the help of intelligent terminals, who could master personal data became a problem worthy of serious consideration. Another characteristic of hard rule governance was that the right to make rules was transferred from the government to the enterprise. However, the government must require the enterprise to accept supervision or cooperate with it because of its own ruling. This made the distinction between public law and private law in the traditional legal theory. It was getting blurred and even dying. The arrival of a smart society meant the subversion and reconstruction of traditional jurisprudence.

The future has arrived, how should humans respond? Professor Feng Xiang believed that although the learning ability of artificial intelligence would advance rapidly with the development of technology, humans should not give up learning. On the contrary, the right answer to the challenge of artificial intelligence was that human beings must learn continuously and learn for life, especially for legal people. In the future intelligent society, everyone must enter the pattern of lifelong learning, and the law itself would develop in this direction.

At last, Professor Feng Xiang also patiently and meticulously answered the questions about the influence of artificial intelligence on the ideological field and the relationship between administrative power and artificial intelligence. Professor Feng Xiang had a broad vision, with a thorough understanding of both Chinese and Western cultures. The lecture was a complete success.